Tales of Chinatown eBook

“See here!” Cohen withdrew his arm from
the other’s grasp angrily. “You
can’t freeze me out of this claim with bogey
stuff. You’re listed, my lad, and you know
it. Chief Inspector Kerry is your pet nightmare.
But if he walked in here right now I could ask him
to have a drink. I wouldn’t but I could.
You’ve got the wrong angle, Jim. Lala
likes me fine, and although she doesn’t say
much, what she does say is straight. I’ll
ask her to-night about the Chink.”

“Then you’ll be a damned fool.”

“What’s that?”

“I say you’ll be a damned fool.
I’m warning you, Freddy. There are Chinks
and Chinks. All the boys know old Huang Chow
has got a regular gold mine buried somewhere under
the floor. But all the boys don’t know
what I know, and it seems that you don’t either.”

“Huang Chow is a mighty big bug amongst the
Chinese,” he whispered, glancing cautiously
about him. “He’s hellish clever
and rotten with money. A man like that wants
handling. I’m not telling you what I know.
But call it fifty-fifty and maybe you’ll come
out alive.”

The brow of Diamond Fred displayed beads of perspiration,
and with a blue silk handkerchief which he carried
in his breast pocket he delicately dried his forehead.

“You’re an old hand at this stuff, Jim,”
he muttered. “It amounts to this, I suppose;
that if I don’t agree you’ll queer my
game?”

Jim Poland’s brow lowered and he clenched his
fists formidably. Then:

“Listen,” he said in his hoarse voice.
“It ain’t your claim any more than mine.
You’ve covered it different, that’s all.
Yours was always the petticoat lay. Mine’s
slower but safer. Is anyone else in with you?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll double up. Now I’ll
tell you something. I was backing out.”

“What? You were going to quit?”

“I was.”

“Why?”

“Because the thing’s too dead easy, and
a thing like that always looks like hell to me.”

Freddy Cohen finished his glass of whisky.

“Wait while I get some more drinks,” he
said.

In this way, then, at about the hour of ten on a stuffy
autumn night, in the crowded bar of that Wapping public-house,
these two made a compact; and of its outcome and of
the next appearance of Cohen, the Jewish-American
cracksman, within the ken of man, I shall now proceed
to tell.

II

THE END OF COHEN

“I’ve been expecting this,” said
Chief Inspector Kerry. He tilted his bowler
hat farther forward over his brow and contemplated
the ghastly exhibit which lay upon the slab of the
mortuary. Two other police officers—­one
in uniform—­were present, and they treated
the celebrated Chief Inspector with the deference which
he had not only earned but had always demanded from
his subordinates.